


Birthday

by leiascully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Birthday, F/M, X-Files OctoberFicFest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-13
Updated: 2016-10-13
Packaged: 2018-08-22 13:48:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8287918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: Scully likes to make a day of Mulder’s birthday.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: n/a  
> A/N: Happy 10/13.  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

Scully likes to make a day of Mulder’s birthday. She brings in a French press and an electric kettle and makes real coffee, and buys pastries from the shop around the block. He always looks a little abashed, as if he can’t believe anyone cares enough to celebrate him, but then he smiles and makes a joke. 

“Thank you, Scully,” he says, with a husky undertone to his voice she doesn’t always hear. 

“You’re welcome,” she says. She pulls the pastries out of the box and sets them on a real plate. Mulder pours the coffee and she hands him a small bottle of cream. They eat them together sitting across from each other at his desk. He brushes flaky crumbs out from between the pages of his reports for days afterward, and grins to himself. She smiles into the shelter of her hand, watching him from the corner of her eye, and sips at her coffee. She might as well drink the good stuff until the cream runs out, after all. She can’t celebrate him the way she’d like to, every day, with all the joy her heart can hold, but she can bring him supernatural tschotchkes for his collection and sit with him and eat the pains au chocolat that remind him of his college years and listen to him reminisce about the good birthdays when his parents still cared and Samantha helped him blow out the candles on his cake.

There are no candles on his cake these days, and no cake to speak of, but they mark the passage of the years anyway, together, stitching together their own rituals.


End file.
